Hard drive maker Seagate has teamed up withy Amazon to create a $99 1TB external hard drive that automatically backs up everything stored on it to the cloud.

Dubbed the Seagate Duet, the drive's contents are cloned to Amazon Drive. All you need to do is plug in the drive, sign in with your Amazon account and that is it.

You can drag and drop files over, and access them from the web or Amazon's Drive app on smartphones and tablets. Seagate claims you'll get a year of unlimited storage just for buying the hard drive, which normally costs $59.99 annually.

Amazon's listing for the Duet has some fine print. At the moment the offer is for the US and is not valid for current Amazon Drive Unlimited Storage paid subscription customers.

You also have to redeem the promo code within two months of buying the hard drive if you want the year's worth of unlimited cloud storage. Returning the Duet, will see your 12 months of unlimited drive storage slashed down to three.

On the surface a deal like this is ten-a-penny for any big chipmaker. Google’s cloud market share is eight percent, just behind Amazon and Microsoft. It is unclear how many chips this deal will involve.

However, analysts are getting excited. AMD’s stock price has shot up by 30 percent since the deal’s announcement.

One of the reasons is that most of the big players in the cloud storage market use Nvidia’s GPUs and this is the first major deal by AMD into a growing market. However Nvidia is in the lead mostly because it was there first and has products which are tried and tested.

But the Google deal shows that AMD is quickly closing the gap with Nvidia. In fact this is the second cloudy deal it has secured in the last two months. The second was Alibaba.

The Google deal is not to turn itself into an AMD only shop – Google’s cloud will feature both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. But if the rest of the cloud-based service providers follow a similar path, AMD will start making a lot of dosh.

Cloud vendors are better off having two GPU suppliers anyway. For a start, it forces Nvidia to drop its prices because it has to compete.

AMD GPUs are cheaper, but perform at a slightly lower spec. Some cloud functions do not require the higher specs and would prefer a cheaper up-front cost. Either way the cloud industry appears to be ready to welcome AMD into its cloudy future which is one of the reasons analysts are so happy.

Networking giant Cisco’s latest Global Cloud Index suggests that more than 92 percent of computer processing will be done in cloud centres by 2020.

Cisco number crunchers think that growing demand for cloud and online services means 92 percent of applications and workloads will run in large-scale, cloud data centers by 2020.

The networking giant’s sixth annual Global Cloud Index report contains a series of divinations and oracles charting how enterprise and consumer use of off-premise services is set to change between now and 2020.

According to the entrails of a rather healthy ram, the amount of cloud-based IP traffic will rise from 3.9 zettabytes to 14.1 zettabytes by 2020, as enterprises and consumers ramp up their use of off-premise apps and services in the years to come.

Meanwhile, according to the way that the chickens are fed, the amount of traffic passing through traditional, enterprise data centers will hit 1.3 zettabytes by 2020, up from 827 exabytes per year in 2015.

The Cisco Sybil, who after chewing laurel leaves and breathing in toxic fumes, said that by 2020, this means just eight per cent of workloads are likely to run in private datacentres, while remaining ones will be hosted in hyperscale, cloud datacentres.

After the priests of Apollo analysed the sooths, Cisco said it expects around 68 per cent of workloads to run in public cloud datacentres by 2020, up from 49 per cent in 2015. Meanwhile, 32 per cent will be hosted in private cloud facilities, which represents a marked drop from 51 per cent last year.

For the first time, Cisco’s oracles have provided a breakdown of how the rise of hyperscale datacentres which are the sorts of things that Facebook, Amazon and Google are running.

Between 2015 and 2020, Cisco believes the number of hyperscale datacentres in the world will increase from 259 to 485, coinciding with a quintuple rise in the amount of network traffic being routed to them.Hyperscale facilities will house around 47 per cent of the world’s total installed datacentre servers, and support 53% of all datacentre traffic by 2020.

While Cisco acknowledges that IoT will be the source of massive amounts of data as more devices come online, at this stage it is unclear how much of that information will need to be stored in datacentres and how much will be processed locally on devices.“Globally, data generated (but not necessarily stored) by IoT will reach 600 ZB per year by 2020, 275 times higher than projected traffic going from datacentres to users/devices,” the report said.

The esoteric business software outfit which makes expensive business software which no one can be certain what it does, has just bought the cloud start-up Altiscale.

SAP said that Altiscale offers cloud based versions of the Hadoop and Spark open source software for storing, processing and analysing different types of data. It is thought that the deal was worth about $125 million but this is mostly guessing.

Altiscale has published a blog post to let its customers know that it will become a part of SAP. Apparently SAP wants to harness its technology:

"Altiscale is a natural fit for SAP, as we share our overall focus of helping enterprises derive business value from data -- and successfully use big data. Since Altiscale is a leader in big data-as-a-service based on Hadoop and Spark, it enables SAP to drive end-to-end value in Big Data across the technology, data platform PaaS (platform as a service), analytics, and application stack".

Raymie Stata, Altiscale cofounder and chief executive, notes that the startup will focus on integrating its technology with SAP and will also work on SAP strategy around data and platform.Altiscale flogs its stuff to Accel Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, Northgate, General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital and Wildcat Venture Partners.

Amazon has just issues a new Unlimited Storage plan launches in the UK for a flat fee of £55 per year.

Free three-month trial available for eligible customers to try out unlimited online storage for photos, videos, movies, music, and other files

The service is being offered through Amazon.co.uk and means customers no longer need to worry about storage limits. All files available for download at their original size and resolution.

The service appears to be pitched at those who have shedloads of photographs they want stored and feel that the main rivals don’t give them enough.

David Nenke, Director of Amazon Drive said that:

“Most people have a lifetime of photos from birthdays, holidays and everyday moments stored across numerous devices—and a lot of those people don’t know how many gigabytes they need to back all those memories up, or what it’s going to cost.”

The service is also available for movies, and music so it is theoretically possible to store a lot of porn there. Amazon said that it is an extension of its unlimited photo storage enjoyed by Prime members. Prime members can add the Unlimited Storage plan to their Amazon Drive accounts.

It seems that Lenovo has managed to buy IBM's reputation along with its server business and scored a contract building data centers for Microsoft.

To be fair, Lenovo is the software giant's fifth data center supplier following HP, Dell, Quanta Computer and Wiwynn but the fact that the Chinese hardware maker is there at all is significant. Lenovo is estimated to start shipping servers to Microsoft in the third quarter.

The contract means that Lenovo is finally getting some distance from its PC business. Before it bought IBM's x86 server business, Lenovo's major server clients were mostly from China. That market has become more competative with Chinese outfits like Inspur and Sugon. Sugon's server sales have achieved 60 percent on-year growth for three consecutive years and the company has a share of 60 percent in China's datacenter market.

This means that Lenovo had to act fast to get itself established on a world stage and its IBM business appears to have been a great purchase to do that. Microsoft is expanding its cloud based operations and is building lots of datacenters worldwide.

The IDC Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker claims that revenues from sales of infrastructure products for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 3.9 per cent on year to US$6.6 billion in the first quarter of 2016.

Total cloud IT infrastructure revenues climbed to a 32.3 per cent share of overall IT revenues in the first quarter of 2016, up from 30.2 per cent share a year ago. Revenues from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 6.8 per cent to $2.8 billion, and to public cloud by 1.9 per cent share to $3.9 billion.

Revenues in the non-cloud IT infrastructure segment decreased by 6 per cent share on year in the first quarter, with declines in both storage and servers, and growth in Ethernet switching. Ethernet switching also showed strong on-year growth in the private and public cloud, 53.7 per cent and 69.4 per cent, respectively. Storage grew 11.5 per cent in the private cloud, but declined 29.6 per cent share in public cloud. Server sales declined 1.1per cent share in private cloud and grew 8.7 per cent in public cloud.

Kuba Stolarski, research director for Computing Platforms at IDC said:

"A slowdown in hyperscale public cloud infrastructure deployment demand negatively impacted growth in both public cloud and cloud IT overall. Private cloud deployment growth also slowed, as 2016 began with difficult comparisons to the first quarter of 2015, when server and storage refresh drove a high level of spend and high growth."

The system refresh is pretty much over and this will continue to push private cloud and, more generally, enterprise IT growth downwards in the near term. Hyperscale demand should return to higher deployment levels later this year, bolstered by service providers who have announced new datacenter builds expected to go online this year.

From a regional perspective, vendor revenues from cloud IT infrastructure sales grew fastest in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) at 25.9 per cent on year in the first quarter of 2016, followed by Western Europe at 20.6 per cent, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) at 18.5 per cent , Japan at 17.7per cent, and Canada at 9.5 per cent. Latin America declined 21.2 per centon year, while the US declined 4.1 per cent and Central and Eastern Europe fell just 0.1per cent.

While IBM's new cloud and mobile business are doing quite well, they are not making enough to off-set the losses from the older traditional arms of the company.

Big Blue reported its worst quarterly revenue in 14 years. Revenue of the world's largest technology services company fell 4.6 percent to $18.68 billion in the first quarter. They beat analysts' average estimate of $18.29 billion which was like a ray of gold in the darkness. Otherwise the story was of IBM having its 16th straight quarter of revenue decline.

Under Chief Executive Ginni Rometty, IBM has been moving toward areas such as cloud-based services, security software and data analytics, while trimming its traditional hardware business by exiting low-margin businesses. It also teamed up with the fruty cargo cult Apple to push its tablets and mobile gear into business. Dispite being hailed by the Tame Apple Press as a way of IBM making billions from businesses, that went about as well as we thought it would.

What IBM is experiencing is a huge falloff in its traditional businesses was dwarfing the company's ability to capture new revenue.

Revenue from "strategic imperatives," which includes cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose about 14 percent in the first quarter. But revenue from the services fell 4.3 percent and hardware dropped by 21.8 percent,.

HyperX, a division of Kingston has told us that its HyperX Cloud Revolver headset will ship May 9 and is available for pre-order tomorrow.

Initially it will be sold through Scan and Amazon will be taking orders after that.

The headset features a studio grade sound stage with 50mm directional drivers to deliver wider depth and width for improved audio precision in first-person shooter and open environment games.

The tuning of the driver, mechanical design of the front acoustical chamber, larger ear cups and exhaust vents allow users to hear an opponent more clearly from further away and gain the ultimate competitive advantage.

HyperX Cloud Revolver uses signature red memory foam and premium leatherette on the ear cups and head band to provide comfort and quality for long hours of gameplay.

The steel frame suspension design provides long-lasting durability, stability and quality. HyperX Cloud Revolver’s detachable noise-cancelling microphone offers crisp, clean and clear voice quality and reduced background noise. It is multi-platform compatible and is certified by TeamSpeak and Discord. It is also Skype compatible, Ventrilo, Mumble and RaidCall. A 2mm audio control box extension is also included with stereo and mic plugs.

Vincent Jurgens, EMEA Marketing Manager, HyperX said that fans who attend the DreamHack Masters 2016 in Malmö, Sweden, on April 16-17 will be among the first to have the opportunity to try and purchase the HyperX Cloud Revolver. HyperX is the official headset sponsor of the championship.

“HyperX Cloud Revolver’s wide audio sound profile will be a game changer in the FPS genre. Gamers who wear this headset will have an advantage as they’ll be able to hear their opponents’ location from further away,” Jurgens said.

Acer plans to implement a corporate restructuring project and divide its business into three major segments – PC, cloud and data center management, and re-investment businesses.

According to Digitimes, the company may set up three entities to handle related businesses and then transform itself into a holding company to control the three subsidiaries.

Acer's PC business should cover PCs monitors, projectors and servers, while the cloud and data center business will cover mainly Acer's build your own cloud and e-Enabling Data Center business units.

The cunning plan is to give flexibility for Acer to either attract strategic investors or off-load businesses that are not making enough cash. The planned holding company may be formed in the second half of the year.